Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

We were supposed to sing the anthem lyrics, “Arise, enormous country,” and a few military songs. To help us learn them, they played records over and over, and by the end of the day I was full of the refrain “Let noble anger boil up like a wave, it is a people’s war, a holy war.”

This was not a song. The chorus voices grew stronger and crossed the limit beyond which the choir and the audience disappeared, leaving only the all-penetrating, earthshaking sound: “Arise, enormous country,” said the internal voice of the rampant universe.

When the wooden idol-knights were dug in, I realized that they could have sung “Arise, enormous country”: they grew on the field of oblivion, and no power on earth could save them from their spell, turn them back into living people.

I touched the closest statue and felt the firm dry wood; suddenly I understood that my father had never known his father and grandfather. For an instant under the crimson, dangerously open spring sky his drama, his double orphanhood was revealed to me.

Father was hypersensitive about order. Every item on his desk at home looked as if it had been placed there by someone obsessed by geometry, a paranoiac of right angles, who could detect even one degree of misalignment. It was the ultimate arrangement, as if each time he left he might not come back and therefore assembled his things so that he might remember them forever.

I never saw Father arrange anything on purpose or expend any effort to maintain that order; but I couldn’t say that it happened on its own. Without effort and without spontaneity, he created order by his very existence. When I was at home, alone at his desk, I lay in wait for the moment a book would be crookedly poised, hanging over the edge of the desk, as if I hoped to get through to my father via that gap of a few degrees.

Father probably became a brilliant specialist in catastrophe theory because of this sensitivity. I think that he “got” the world only in static forms; the fear of shifts, spasms, and drift made him a marvelous “earphone,” a human radar. I sometimes saw huge graphs on millimeter-squared paper on his desk, the teeth and dips of extremes, I saw Father bent over them, and I could sense that those teeth were digging into him, wounding him, and that he was suffering; as if an ancient chthonic creature, the god of chaos, had dug its claws or fangs into him.

He sought order, and not in the police sense of enforced regulation. Rather, he wanted the world to be fixed, once and for all. He spent a lot of time with maps, the principles of cartography, the compilation of map legends, the signs for depicting objects for seismically unstable regions. I think that unconsciously he thought of the world as a map on a scale of one-to-one. A map is a special kind of cultural object, in which reality is given in an ideal state, which can be imagined but never occurs in reality. Every map is a utopia and an anachronism, a moment of fixed time, it becomes obsolete the moment it is created, and in using maps we deal with a past that is specially organized so that it names and reveals itself.

He had the personality of a collector, a seeker of causal relationships that can be laid out on a baize-covered surface; minerals, shells, plants, stamps—he collected a bit of everything. The collecting could not become a passion because I don’t think he had any passion in him; a collection was the model of an arrested, compartmentalized universe—there’s a reason those drawers with sections resemble prison cells. The world as it is did not suit him, the world had to be repacked, made transparent, reduced to museum methodology.

Order was not merely observed at home; it was simply an expression of his figure, his character, his will. The collections—from badges to stamp albums—were external bastions, defensive walls protecting him from the unpredictable world around him.

As a development of his desire for order, he had an almost painful preference for symmetry. He kept trying to restore a disturbed inner balance, placing spoon and fork equidistant from his plate, setting the toothbrush mugs in the corners of the bathroom shelf, putting books in piles, performing numerous tiny operations with objects according to unknown principles—color? form? weight? application?—setting them up in pairs, one balancing the other to achieve a harmonic state known only to him.

He sought stability, steadfastness in daily life, sought it with such force that you guessed an unconscious fear behind it. Born in the war and four years old when it ended with Japan’s capitulation, Father must have developed a fear of history’s catastrophic nature, preferring times with no extreme characteristics, either positive or negative. After all, the period that was called “stagnation” in the history of the USSR was actually the realization of very definite hopes of the grown generation of children of the forties. And the generation of their parents.

I think that Grandmother Tanya, who lost almost all her brothers and sisters in the war, a widow, unconsciously brought up her son to be unobtrusive, even unnoticeable. I don’t mean she wanted him to hide from everything or become a gray creature no one was interested in. Grandmother wanted him to have a glorious fate and success; but a fate and a success that were providentially safe, the kind that were not entirely real.

I think that when he was born, she begged—this is a story for a Greek myth or a sermon—that her son never be noticed by the gods, neither with evil intentions nor with good ones. Her wish came true—the man instinctively avoided extreme situations that would bring him to the fore; a man of the firm middle ground.

She must have been horrified by her wish come true; but the gods could not intervene a second time, even if she asked—it would contradict the first, strict condition of their agreement.

I would think she was not the only woman to request that her child be saved from fate, that her child not be seen as a target for the forces of historical destiny hovering over continents and oceans; and she was not the only one who was heard after the great and terrible war.

In some sense (higher than the juxtaposition of faith and atheism) they were prayer-saved children. But who knows what such children miss, if this apparent protection they allegedly received meant being left alone, left behind, separated from life.

Not a Party member, not an activist, not a former adept of Communism, Father nevertheless accepted the USSR as an adequate form for his existence. The cumbersome state, historical, and cultural construct, incapable of development despite its progressive rhetoric, suited his profound need for stopped time, and the rest—the absurd ideology, the inconveniences of daily life, the absence of freedom—was a heavy but not impossible price to pay for that deep and crucial correlation.

Of course, there were times when the price was unbearable and to accommodate it, to survive, he created—and imposed—crazy ideas.

He had a central concept from which came his perceptions of people and his attitude toward life. I may be exaggerating by picking out only one aspect of a complex, but I remember the paralyzing effect that the word “willpower” had on me.

When I did not want to do something, did not understand why it was necessary, did not want to accept something imposed upon me as my own idea, could not allow someone else’s opinion of me to become mine, did not want to give up my sensation, feeling, mood, or thought, Father would say that I lacked willpower, and said it as if my very existence was a violation of a universal agreement and I was an indecent and shameful figure.

Willpower was an instrument of self-coercion that helped you survive in a place where your wishes and intentions were meaningless. Obstacles, barriers, and violence caused by injustice, stupidity, lies, and the absurdity of circumstances were seen out of any context that required a definite moral reaction: just a dynamic phenomenon, a useful piece of exercise equipment for that willpower.